After more than 500 years of Curacao's discovery by the Spanish sailor, Olonso de Ojeda, Curaçao has never looked better.

The Spaniards, looking for gold and silver, stumbled on Curacao in 1499, but had little interest in the island since Curacao had neither, but everything changed when the Dutch West India Company looking for salt for the Dutch fish industry, captured Curaçao  from the Spanish in 1634. the Dutch established themselves on the east bank of the Santa Anna bay, Punda
Punda was laid out in the Dutch style on a strict grid pattern as a walled city. The city was growing so fast that by the 1700's all available land had been developed. So by 1707 Governor Becks gave official permission to build in Otrobanda.

The three major ethnic groups (Dutch, Sephardic Jews, and Africans) who dominated Curacao's early history were joined by successive waves of immigrants when Shell opened it's oil refinery in 1918 from all over the world.